Tag: US policy

The myth of linkage

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer presented a version of this post in the Director’s Series at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies on October 24. First posted at Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) on June 12.

Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.” I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is—that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is the other Middle East conflict? But as I read through the first sentence, it became clear that I was totally wrong. The editorialist, or the headline writer, assumed that most readers would understand “the Middle East conflict” to be the war in Iraq. By the “other Middle East conflict,” it turned out, they meant the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which was the subject of the editorial.

I began to wonder whether typical students, in a classroom, would know what I was talking about if I started discussing “the Middle East conflict” without defining it. And if I defined it as Israel and the Palestinians, would I be showing my age?

It also reminded me of something else that had surprised me: a 2005 National Geographic survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, asking them to look at a blank map of the Middle East and locate Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I would have guessed that Israel would have loomed largest on the mental maps of young Americans today.

I would have been wrong. 37 percent can identify Iraq and 37 percent can find Saudi Arabia—not high percentages overall. But even fewer, 26 percent, can identify Iran, and still fewer, 25 percent, can find Israel on a blank map. Perhaps it isn’t surprising when one recalls that war has cycled well over a million Americans through Iraq and Afghanistan—as soldiers, administrators, and contractors. It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centered—away from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention.

But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driven—that is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention.

And it isn’t just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right?” Carter’s answer: “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact…. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”

This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide.

But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the region’s conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its “resolution” cannot resolve another.

So the more interesting question is this: why is the idea of “linkage” so persistent in some quarters? Why are there still people who see one particular conflict as “the Middle East conflict,” and who believe that in seeking to resolve it, they are pursuing “the Middle East peace process”?

Some would answer this question by pointing to the world’s fascination with Israel. Unlike, say, the future of the Kurds, the future of Israel (and the Palestinians) fascinates the world. A conflict involving Jews, set in the Holy Land of Christianity and in a place of high significance to Islam, is destined to received more than its share of attention. There is also an illusion of familiarity with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one beyond the specialists can spell out the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, or understand why the (Muslim) Sudanese government is persecuting the (Muslim) people of Darfur. But many people believe (usually wrongly) that they understand the core of the issue between Israel and the Palestinians.

Others might point to the West’s self-imposed obligation to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Europe, but to some extent also in America and even Israel, there is a perceived sense of guilt at having caused the conflict in the first place. There may be other conflicts that are more dangerous, but foreigners did not create the Arab-Persian or Shiite-Sunni conflicts, whereas the international community facilitated the creation of Israel and legitimated it by a U.N. resolution, along with a Palestinian state. Thus, many believe, the world has a special obligation to employ all means to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, by creating that Palestinian state.

Others might point to the fact that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and the leftover Israeli-Syrian conflict) still lies just around the corner, because it was once so tantalizingly close. All of the conflicts’ protagonists were regular guests in the White House and frequent guests of a succession of Secretaries of State. No one knows what it would take to end other conflicts, but there are “parameters” for ending this one. The United States theoretically has enough leverage on Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians, and if only it were prepared to use it, this conflict could be ended, along predictable lines.

All of these beliefs are widespread, and they explain why so much attention and effort have been lavished on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they do not explain the belief in linkage. It is possible to be fascinated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feel obligated to resolve it, and think it is relatively easy to resolve, and still not believe in linkage—that is, that the success of your efforts will bring a greater reward across the Middle East, or that an absence of progress will have grave consequences across the region.

The concept of linkage requires another belief: that the Middle East is a system, like Europe, and that its conflicts are related to one another.

Europe in modern times became a complex, interlocking system in which an event in one corner could set off a chain reaction. In Europe, local conflicts could escalate very rapidly into European conflicts (and ultimately, given Europe’s world dominance, into global conflicts). And Europe had a core problem: the conflict between Germany and France. Resolving it was a precondition for bringing peace to the entire continent. Churchill put his finger on this in 1946: “The first step in the re-creation of the European Family,” he said, “must be a partnership between France and Germany.”

Linkage, I propose—and this is my original thesis—is a projection of this memory of Europe’s re-creation onto the Middle East. The pacification of Europe was the signal achievement of the United States and its allies in the middle of the 20th century. It then became the prism through which the United States and Europe came to view the Middle East. From NATO to the European Union, from the reconstruction of Germany to Benelux, Europe’s experience has provided the template for visions of the future Middle East.

It was this mindset that led analysts and diplomats, for about three decades after the creation of Israel, to interpret Israel’s conflict with its neighbors as “the Middle East conflict.” Like the conflict between France and Germany, the Arab-Israeli conflict was understood to be the prime cause of general instability throughout the region, as evidenced by repeated Arab-Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

The flaws in the analogy only began to appear after Egypt and Israel achieved peace in 1979. From that point onward, the Arab-Israeli conflict moved in fits and starts toward resolution. Yet other conflicts in the region intensified. Large-scale wars erupted—not between Israel and its neighbors, but in the Persian Gulf, where a revolution in Iran, and the belligerence of Iraq, exacted a horrendous toll and required repeated U.S. interventions.

By any objective reading, the reality should have been clear: the Middle East is not analogous to Europe, it has multiple sources of conflict, and even as one conflict moves to resolution, another may be inflamed. This is because the Middle East is not a single system of interlocking parts. It is made up of smaller systems and distinct pieces, that function independently of one another.

The myth of “linkage” persists, then, because many observers cannot shed the analogy of the Middle East with Europe. A good case is Brzezinski, a man who did play a role in reconstructing Europe, and who has said: “The problems of the Middle East are conflated, and certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq are interactive. That’s absolutely a fundamental truth.” This is no more than a profession of faith, mere habit and analogy substituting for analysis. In what way are these problems conflated? How are they interactive? Brzezinski offers no substantiation at all.

The myth of linkage also persists because, paradoxically, the neo-conservatives embraced it. They, too, made extravagant claims about the likely effects of Iraq’s “liberation” from Saddam’s regime, which they understood as directly analogous to the destruction of Hitler’s dictatorship. Former CIA director James Woolsey, before the war, used precisely this analogy: “This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world. Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.” But it may have been a realist, Henry Kissinger, who first claimed that “the road to Jerusalem will lead through Baghdad”—that victory over Iraq would produce a peace dividend for Israel. Saddam’s fall hasn’t had any such effect, but such claims have tended to validate the idea of linkage as a principle—that roads from here lead to there.

Finally, there is the deliberate effort by Iran, Al Qaeda, and others, to create linkage, or at least the illusion of it. In a bid for the sympathy of the fabled “Arab street,” they seek to portray the conflict with Israel as a supra-conflict between Islam and evil. The globalized Arab media such as Al Jazeera effectively do the same. Then various Pew and Zogby polls pick up the reverberations, and spread the message to Western elites that nothing interests the “Arab street” so much as Israeli misdeeds and American support for them.

Take, for example, this statement by Jimmy Carter:

There is no doubt: The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly. Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.

Carter, of course, has no idea what is in the “heart and mind of every Muslim.” He simply picks up sound bites from pollsters and so-called experts on Arab opinion. He then avoids the inconvenient fact that while the United States has been accused for decades of doing nothing for the Palestinians, its popularity in places like Jordan and Egypt has only plummeted since the Iraq invasion—military action that removed a ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was beloved by the “Arab street” and Arab intellectuals.

I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region. But is it destined to remain so?

I still believe Middle East is less integrated than Europe, but it does share one feature with early 20th-century Europe. Until now, the Middle East has had more geography than military power. States have been unable to project power very far beyond their borders. But the spread of missiles and, possibly, nuclear weapons, could change that, leaving states with too little geography and too much power. In these conditions, conflicts that have been localized could become regionalized. In this case, it would not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would occupy the place of France and Germany. It would be the conflict between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and the moderate Arab states. Such a conflict could configure the Middle East as one region, collapse the distance between the Levant and the Gulf, produce arms races, spur nuclear proliferation and proxy wars, create tightly-integrated alliances—in short, make the Middle East very much like Europe in its darkest days.

Whether the United States will act to affirm the pax Americana, by checking Iran’s rise, remains to be seen. Whether or not it does, but especially if it does not, the common understanding of “the Middle East conflict” seems destined to shift again. We may then look back with nostalgia to a time when the grandiose title of “the Middle East conflict” belonged to Israelis and Palestinians. The next Middle East conflict could be very different.

Clusters of Conflict

  • First, the Arab-Persian conflict (with its origins in earlier Ottoman-Persian conflict). This manifested itself in our time most destructively in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and it continues to inflame post-Saddam Iraq and other parts of the Arab/Persian Gulf (even the name of which is the subject of dispute). This is probably one of the oldest rivalries in the history of the world. It has been exacerbated by the bid of Iran, under the Shah and now under the Islamic regime, to restore lost imperial greatness and achieve hegemonic dominance over the Gulf and beyond.
  • Second, the Shiite-Sunni conflict, which goes back in various forms for fourteen centuries, and which the struggle for Iraq has greatly inflamed, both within that country and beyond. There is some overlap here with Arab-Persian conflict, but the Shiite-Sunni conflict also divides Arabs against each other, in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries. The ruthless violence between the sects in Iraq suggested the savage potential of this sectarianism, which has some potential to spread to other places in the Middle East where Shiites and Sunnis contest power and privilege.
  • Third, the Kurdish awakening, which involves a large national group experiencing a political revival in the territory of several existing states. Over the past two decades, violent conflict generated by Kurdish aspirations has torn at the fabric of Turkey and Iraq. Kurdish groups have used terrorism, and states have used scorched-earth repression and chemical weapons against Kurds. Now that Iraqi Kurds have established a de facto state in northern Iraq, there is every prospect that the Kurdish awakening will generate more conflict, and that it will spill over borders, possibly involving Turkey, Iran, and Syria.
  • Fourth, the inter-Arab conflict among Arab states over primacy, influence, and borders—the result of disputes created by the post-Ottoman partition of the Arab lands by Britain and France. In some places, these disputes are exacerbated by the inequities in nature’s apportioning of oil resources. The most destructive example of such a conflict in our times was Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait—the attempted erasure of one Arab state by another. Other examples include Nasser’s invasion of Yemen and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon.
  • Fifth, conflicts over the political aspirations of compact Christian groups with strong historic ties to the West. Foreign Christian minorities were turned out of the region decades ago, but the Maronites of Lebanon and the Greeks of Cyprus have held their ground. In the 1970s, wars were launched to deprive them of their political standing, leading in Cyprus to de facto partition between Greek and Turkish areas, and in Lebanon to a quasi-cantonization. These conflicts have defied all attempts at final resolution.
  • Sixth, conflicts that arise from the quest of Arab states to preserve or restore parts of their pre-colonial African empires. The most significant conflicts in this category are the long-running war in Sudan, which has descended into genocide in Darfur, and the festering contest over Western Sahara.
  • Seventh, the nationalist-Islamist conflicts within states, which are the result of failed modernization and the disappointed expectations of independence. The costliest of these conflicts in our time were the Iranian revolution in the 1970s (Islamists prevailed), the Islamist uprising in Syria in the 1980s (nationalists won), and the civil war that ravaged Algeria for much of the 1990s (nationalists triumphed). Smaller-scale conflict has occurred in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and is now afflicting the Palestinian territories.
  • Eighth, numerous conflicts, centered in the Persian Gulf, generated by the addiction of the industrialized West to the vast oil resources of the region, and the need of the United States to maintain its hegemony over the world’s single largest reservoir of energy. The United States essentially keeps the Gulf as an American lake, using aggressive diplomacy, arms sales to clients, and its own massive force to keep oil flowing at reasonable prices. This has put the United States in direct conflict with regional opponents—Islamic Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, and a non-state actor, Al Qaeda—who have seen its dominance as disguised imperialism. In particular, U.S.-Iranian conflict for regional hegemony has escalated over the last thirty years, and is now being exacerbated by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and pursuit of regional power status.
  • Ninth, there is conflict involving Israel, on three planes: Arab-Israeli (that is, Israel versus Arab states), Palestinian-Israeli, and Iranian-Israeli. The Arab-Israeli conflict produced a series of four inter-state wars in each of the four decades beginning in 1948. But since Egypt’s peace with Israel, three decades ago, there have been no general Arab-Israeli wars, and Israel has negotiated formal or de facto agreements or understandings with neighboring states. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict periodically erupts and subsides (most dramatically in two intifadas), and continues to defy resolution, but hasn’t led to a regional conflagration. The brewing Iranian-Israeli conflict isn’t about the Palestinians; it is an extension of the contest between the U.S. and Iran for regional dominance. So far, this conflict has manifested itself in short but sharp contests between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Middle East and elections ’08

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks to a closed session of the board of trustees of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The session was devoted to the Middle East in the 2008 elections, and it was held in Lansdowne, Virginia on October 19, 2007. Chair: Robert Satloff, director of the Institute; co-panelist, Dennis Ross, Institute distinguished fellow. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Thanks, Rob. As Rob has pointed out, I’m an adviser to a political campaign—I’m the senior Middle East adviser to the Giuliani campaign. If you’d compiled a list of people at The Washington Institute likely to end up with such an exalted title in any of the campaigns, Dennis Ross would have been at the top, and I’d have been at the bottom. I certainly didn’t seek it, because I didn’t imagine it.

Now I’m in the idea business. I didn’t get the call because of my experience in government—I haven’t got any—or my personal charm or connection to the candidate—I hadn’t met the Mayor. I like to think I was approached because at least some of my ideas resonated in the Giuliani campaign.

Now as an adviser, I simply continue to do what I’ve always done, which is look hard at the Middle East, and speak what I believe to be the truth. I also listen to other advisers, and learn from them. The point I want to emphasize this morning is that I’m not a spokesperson for the campaign—I provide input, not output. If you want output, read the Mayor’s Foreign Affairs article and listen to him speak. Nor have I turned into an instant analyst of American politics. I don’t closely watch the other candidates, Republican or Democrat, and it’s not my job to campaign.

My aim is to make sure that if Mayor Giuliani is elected president a year from now, he’ll have a full panoply of realistic ideas about what’s needed and feasible in the Middle East, to take with him to the White House two months later.

So this morning, I won’t speak for the Mayor, or indulge in campaigning, or parse the positions of the candidates. Instead I’ll talk about what I see as the stakes in this election. I believe my ideas largely conform to the Mayor’s stated positions, and where they do, I’ll mention them, or my understanding of them. By the way, it’s no small matter to keep up with what a candidate says on the road. He’ll be asked a question on Iran or Iraq by a voter in New Hampshire or Iowa, and I won’t know the answer before you do. But I know I’ve made the right choice because I haven’t been unpleasantly surprised. There are advisers to other campaigns who can’t say the same.

So that’s my preamble. Now to substance. It’s obvious that a lot of what’s at stake in this election turns on America’s role in the Middle East. But before we break it down to specific issues, we have to step back and ask a big question. The big question is this: are we really in a war on terror?

That question’s been sharpened for us by Tom Friedman and Norman Podhoretz. Friedman recently published a column in the New York Times under the headline “9/11 is Over.” Podhoretz has published a new book under the title World War IV. These two ideas—”9/11 is Over” and “World War IV”—neatly define the two opposite poles of the debate that’s at the very heart of this election.

In his piece, Friedman wrote this: “I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate. What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid.” Why? It’s caused us to neglect other things more important. Such as, you ask? As an example of neglect, Friedman complained: “I still can’t get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C.” Leave it to Tom to undermine his own proposition. But the proposition is clear, and it’s this: “Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July—which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.”

Opposite Friedman’s determination that 9/11 ended on 9/12, is Norman Podhoretz’s belief that 9/11, in his words, “constituted an open declaration of war on the United States, and the war into which it catapulted us was nothing less than another world war.” (He calls it World War IV—the Cold War was World War III.) Podhoretz predicts this world war will last three or four decades, as the Cold War did. If you ask him where we are now, in comparison to the Cold War, he’ll tell you we’re only in 1952 or thereabouts. 9/11, far from making us stupid, finally wised us up—or should have. Podhoretz also knows who he thinks should lead America in wartime: he’s a senior foreign policy adviser to the Giuliani campaign.

Now I suspect the vast majority of Americans don’t think 9/11 is over, but also don’t feel that we’re in a world war. As I said, these are the two opposite poles of the debate. But even if these are two views from the far poles, I think they do frame the debate. This election, to the extent it’s about foreign policy and national security, is about whether Americans believe we’re in a 9/11 war.

That may seem paradoxical, because some people think this election is about the Iraq war. Others think it’s about a possible Iran war. But these are policy subsets of the bigger question framed by Friedman and Podhoretz. How you answer that bigger question will inflect your answer to all the lesser questions.

So Americans first have to decide whether we’re in a war that began on 9/11. Yes, we haven’t had an attack since 9/11. Does that mean 9/11 was a one-off unlucky hit, to which we’ve overreacted with a “war on terror”? Or is the “war on terror”—the fact that we’ve been on the offensive—the real reason 9/11 hasn’t been repeated? (Actually, 9/11 has been repeated—just not here. 9/11 wasn’t followed by 9/12, it was followed by 3/11 in Madrid and 7/7 in London and other attacks.)

Now even Tom Friedman, only one week after his “9/11 is Over” piece, wrote this in another column: “The struggle against radical Islam is the fight of our generation.” He may think the world is flat, but there are some truths even Tom can’t deny. Ironically, his words are almost identical to this snippet from Rudy Giuliani’s website: “Rudy Giuliani believes winning the war on terror is the great responsibility of our generation.” In Giuliani’s view, this makes us “all members of the 9/11 generation.” Maybe you think we are, and maybe you think we aren’t: labeling generations is tricky business. But we’re all certainly post-9/11, in this crucial respect: we’re now aware that we have a determined enemy called “radical Islam” or, as Giuliani called it in his article in Foreign Affairs, “radical Islamic fascism.” If we don’t defeat this enemy, it will strike us again. This means that, like it or not, we’re electing a war president—someone who’ll have to act, every day, not just as our president, but as commander in chief.

Now even the candidates who speak of the “war on terror” against “radical Islam” have different ideas on what the “central front” is. Is it Iraq? Or is it Afghanistan? Maybe it’s always been Iran? Or is it in hearts and minds—the war on ideas? Where should we lay the greater emphasis, where should we deploy the most resources, where should we pull back and where should we push forward, and what should be our mix of hard power and soft power? Who are our true allies, and who are our real adversaries? How important is the spread of democracy to our winning the war?

These are all questions about which reasonable people can differ. But to me, these are subsets of another bigger question. I would put it this way: are we prepared to stand our ground in the Middle East, if that’s what it takes to win?

For decades, the United States didn’t have to stand on the ground in the Middle East. It maintained an off-shore position—it engaged, at times, in what’s been called off-shore balancing. The United States maintained its position through diplomacy, arms sales, economic sanctions—everything short of boots on the ground. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq represented a clear break from that past. The United States went on-shore, after some of our enemies were emboldened to cross the oceans and attack us on our shores.

The Iraq war is still enveloped in a fog, but there are people who believe that going on-shore was a mistake, and who want to go back to the off-shore posture. In all the discussion of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s conspiracy theories in their book The Israel Lobby, people overlook the alternative strategy they offer at the end, which is off-shore balancing. Let me quote them:

This strategy would be less ambitious in scope but much more effective at protecting US interests in the Middle East…. This strategy categorically rejects using military force to reshape the Middle East, [and] it also recognizes that the United States does not need to control this vitally important region; it merely needs to ensure that no other country does…. Off-shore balancing minimizes the resentment created when American troops are permanently stationed on Arab soil. This resentment often manifests itself in terrorism…. In effect, a strategy of offshore balancing would reverse virtually all of America’s current regional policies…. The United States would withdraw as soon as possible from Iraq… push Israel to give up the Golan Heights [to] drive a wedge between Syria and Iran… [and] cut a deal on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has emerged as the champion of this strategy among advisers to candidates. I don’t think it far-fetched to say that a preference for the off-shore posture runs like a thread through the positions of all the Democratic candidates. There are variations, and perhaps Dennis can explain them. Martin Indyk’s piece in the new The American Interest, called “Back to Balancing,” is a more muscular version. But this is the preferred strategy. The crux of the debate among Democrats is who’s willing to promise to get us back off-shore the fastest, and keep us off-shore.

Now the question each of us must answer is this: if we were to go off-shore in the Middle East, who would balance off whom, and who would fill the vacuum? The thread running through the positions of the Republican candidates is that if we move to an off-shore position, if we don’t stand our ground, our allies won’t be able to stand their ground even with our remote support. Our radical Islamist enemies will fill the vacuum. If we don’t strategically control—yes, control—the Persian Gulf region, from the strait of Hormuz up to the Iraqi-Turkish border, our enemies eventually will control it. If we leave Iraq in chaos, our enemies will control it. If Iran acquires a nuclear capability, this corridor will no longer be within our strategic control. Uncertainty will grow, terrorists will be emboldened, oil prices will skyrocket, our enemies will be enriched, and they’ll build and buy weapons of mass destruction. The Pax Americana will be over.

Only American military power, and our perceived willingness to use it, on-shore, can prevent the worst scenarios. Timetables for withdrawals and taking military options off the table constrain us, and just embolden our enemies. This is what Giuliani means when he says we must stay on offense in the war, and that staying on offense will shorten the war. The idea that we can cajole, entice, persuade, and incentivize our allies and even our adversaries into doing our bidding is plain naive. Of course, ultimately it has to be our aim to return to our traditional posture off-shore—but as the victor, not as the vanquished.

I’ve saved the Israeli-Palestinian issue for last, but there are those who would put it first. Why the difference? Because there are different answers to this question: how central is resolving this conflict to U.S. interests in the Middle East?

There was a time not long ago, when people of a certain generation, older than mine, believed as a matter of course that this conflict was the source of all our troubles in the Middle East, and resolving it was the key to fixing the Middle East. Indeed, it was the “Middle East conflict,” solving it was the “Middle East peace process.” Today, serious people no longer take this for granted: Iran’s revolution, three Iraq wars, the rise of Al Qaeda parallel to the Oslo process—today we understand that the Middle East doesn’t have a root conflict. It has many conflicts. Success here doesn’t guarantee success there; the same with failure.

Many of the candidates have records of strong support for Israel. There’s no reason to question them. The more relevant question is who has learned from 9/11 to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in proper perspective, and not overvalue the “peace process” as a panacea. Giuliani spoke to this in his Foreign Affairs piece, when he wrote this, and I quote:

The Palestinian people need decent governance first, as a prerequisite for statehood. Too much emphasis has been placed on brokering negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians—negotiations that bring up the same issues again and again. It is not in the interest of the United States, at a time when it is being threatened by Islamist terrorists, to assist the creation of another state that will support terrorism. Palestinian statehood will have to be earned through sustained good governance, a clear commitment to fighting terrorism, and a willingness to live in peace with Israel. America’s commitment to Israel’s security is a permanent feature of our foreign policy.

This was misinterpreted in some of the press to mean that Giuliani opposes a Palestinian state. He didn’t say that, but he does dissent from the overvaluation of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The war against radical Islam takes precedence. A Palestinian state won’t necessarily contribute to winning it, and such a state could ally itself with our enemies, if it doesn’t rest on the firm foundations of good governance and fighting terror.

Significantly, Giuliani affirms that the Palestinians have yet to earn their state. This was once the position of the Bush administration, which seems of late to have abandoned it in a go-for-broke gamble. So we see Secretary of State Rice in Ramallah announcing that “Frankly, it’s time for the establishment of a Palestinian state,” and that such as state is “absolutely essential for the future, not just of Palestinians and Israelis but also for the Middle East and indeed to American interests.” To judge from the situation on the ground, frankly, it may not be the time, nor is it clear in what way its creation is absolutely essential to U.S. interests.

As we’ve seen time and again, such statements only free the Palestinians from doing what needs to be done to earn their statehood. Only by pushing the so-called political horizon back, not forward, is there any chance the Palestinians will run to reach it. The over-privileged “peace process,” as traditionally configured, has had the opposite of its intended effect, making the two-state solution still more remote. It needs to be reengineered.

Well, I got through this opening without mentioning the name of any candidate other than the one I advise. I’ve tried to ask what I think are the key questions on guiding principles. You may prefer different answers to mine, and so may prefer a different candidate. But I hope we can agree that these are the questions. Of course, there are hundreds of lesser policy questions, but these are always changing anyway, and they’ll be different in January 2009 when the next president enters the White House. Ask me about them, and I promise to do my very best to avoid answering them. Thank you.

(For the record: Martin Kramer, a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is not and has never been an employee of the Institute, which is non-partisan.)

Geopolitics of the Jews

On By Martin Kramer

Over the winter, I gave a short address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at a meeting in Jerusalem. I took the assignment seriously, and offered these thoughts, more to highlight problems than offer solutions. In this week between Holocaust Memorial Day and Israel’s Independence Day, I share them for wider reflection.

The title of our panel is “Looking Back, Looking Ahead: The Geopolitical Situation of the Jewish People.” This is a moving target: the geopolitical situation of the Jews hasn’t ever been stable. As a people, our geopolitics are one part our preferences, and two parts historical forces. These forces never rest. Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it. The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. One is tempted to say that never in their long history has the geopolitical situation of the Jews been better. Jews did have sovereignty before, in antiquity, but they did not have a strategic alliance with the greatest power on earth. And since it is difficult to imagine a better geopolitical position, the Jewish people has become a status quo people. Once we were revolutionaries; now we don’t need the world to change. Of course we would like an improvement in Israel’s standing with some of its neighbors—what dreamers call “peace.” But we are generally confident or complacent enough to prefer the status quo to the risks of changing it.

Yet as we all should know, history stops for no man, and for no people. I was trained as a historian, and while this gives me no powers of prophecy, I can assure you of one thing. What is, will not be. Balances of power will change. Identities will be recast. Eventually, too, the map of the Middle East will be redrawn.

When we worry, we tend to focus on apocalyptic scenarios. But I invite you to think for a moment about five long-term trends that could erode the status quo, but that fall short of a mushroom cloud. I will proceed from the far to the near, and I will focus on the Israeli side of the equation.

First, U.S. influence in the Middle East could wane. Perhaps you have read the article by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled “The New Middle East.” He wrote: “Less than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the American era in the Middle East… has ended….  The second Iraq war… has precipitated its end.” I think this is premature—America’s era in the Middle East will end one day, but it hasn’t ended yet, and it will take more than Iraq to end it. But Haass’s statement is indicative of a spreading mood. Add this to technological change that could reduce American dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and it is possible that in twenty years’ time, America will be less interested and engaged in the Middle East. What is our Plan B then?

Second, Europe could be subtracted from the sum power of the West. The trends there, of low birth rates, Muslim immigration, multiculturalism—if they are not stopped or reversed, they could have the effect of de-Westernizing Europe. Europe, even without Jews, is part of a cultural and strategic continuum, linking Israel to America. Without that link, Israel would become still more encircled by Islam-inflected hostility. So what is our Plan B then?

Third, Iran could gain regional power status. In fact, the imperial ambition of Iran may be a long-term trend independent of the nature of its regime. Iran could become Israel’s regional rival, even if it postpones its nuclear plans and drops Ahmadinejad. Iran is already using every ounce of its leverage to establish its dominance in Iraq and its influence elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. If Iran emerges as a power on par with Israel—a power intent on drawing Israel into a long cold war of attrition—what is our Plan B?

Fourth, the Arab states around us could succumb to the same sort of disease that is causing Iraq to hemorrhage internally. That disease is the lack of legitimacy. When you look at a map of the Middle East, you are looking at a gerrymandered hodgepodge, drawn a century ago to serve the interests of the long-defunct empires of Britain and France. If Iraq breaks up—and I believe it will—other states could begin to crumble. In some places, it might be Shiites against Sunnis; elsewhere, Islamists against nationalists. This could engulf states on Israel’s borders, and Israel could find itself opposite not one Hezbollah but many. So what is our Plan B?

Fifth, and closest to home, there is the possibility that the two-state solution will become passé, because the Palestinians will fail as a nation. By failure I mean they will not have the cohesion necessary to translate their identity into nation-statehood. Many in Israel presently speak as if the creation of a Palestinian state is essential to Israel’s own legitimacy and even survival. But what if such a state proves to be impossible? A binational state, Israeli-Palestinian, is anathema, so what is our Plan B?

Now one would have to be a grim pessimist to believe that all five of these trends could merge into a perfect storm. But one would have to be an incurable optimist to believe that that we won’t be lashed by any of these storms. And what I am arguing is that we should anticipate conditions that will make storms more frequent than they have been in the last few decades.

We have had a remarkable run these last thirty years. Israel has flourished under the pax Americana. There has been no general Arab-Israeli war since 1973, and peace prevails on most of Israel’s borders. The country’s population has grown, foreign investment has poured in. Israel has expanding relations with the up-and-coming powers in the world. And American Jewry has gained stature and influence, in part by mediating for Israel. This has been a long and productive peace.

But when Herzl wrote The Jewish State, Europe was also thirty years into its long peace. He knew it would not last, that its foundations were weak. He planned accordingly. We should recognize that the status quo in the Middle East won’t last indefinitely, and we have to plan accordingly. I haven’t said what I think has to be done—what alliances to make, what targets to strike, what borders to redraw. But I do say that Israel will have to make alliances, strike targets, and redraw borders—and they won’t necessarily be the familiar ones.

This is going to create stress in the world, and even within the Jewish people. So your tasks will multiply, and they will become more urgent. If you got into this business ten years ago, thinking it would be all gala dinners on the way to a new Middle East, I apologize on behalf of history. The man was on the mark who said that the trouble with our times is that the future just isn’t what it used to be.

See the response of Saul Singer to this post.

Spanish translation here.